Growth of a Novel

One of the great things
about William Carter's
Marcel Proust: A Life is the way it clarifies the evolution of
À la recherche du temps perdu.

Proust began to write the Search in 1908, when was he still a comparatively
young man – young enough indeed to told to report for thirteen days'
military training. (He was excused.) He wrote six
key episodes that year, including the goodnight kiss that opens the
novel, and he already knew that it would be circular, ending with the
Narrator ready to write the novel we have just finished reading. But
he put it aside in 1909 to work on a book about
the literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In the course of this
project, Proust wrote another key episode, an early draft of the famous
madeleine scene in which a morsel of cake
dipped in tea evokes the entire village of Combray.

He spent the summer of 1909 at Cabourg, the seaside resort that became
the "Balbec" of the novel. From there he wrote a friend that "I've just
begun – and finished – a whole long book" (italics
added). Indeed, he had drafted the beginning and the end of the Search,
starting with an early version of what we know as the "Combray" section
of Swann's Way and ending with some or all of the novel's concluding
book, Finding Time Again. "He had at last found his structure,"
William Carter writes of the thirty-eight-year-old author, "one that was
to prove ideal for his narrative skills and manner of composition. Proust
never composed in a linear manner or according to an outline. He always
worked like a mosaicist, taking a particular scene, anecdote, impression,
image, and crafting it to completion."

In this way, the novel grew larger and larger that year and the next,
by which time he was working on the long section that we know as "Swann
in Love." In 1911, he thought he was coming to the end of his task, and
he began looking for a publisher. Toward this end, he arranged for four
excerpts to be published in Le Figaro, a leading newspaper.
Alas, the novel was rejected, even as it continued to grow,
and Proust decided to publish it at his own expense in two volumes,
titled Le Temps perdu (Time Lost, Time Wasted) and Le Temps
retrouvé (Time Regained, Finding Time Again), comprising more
or less what we know as the first and final books of a much larger novel.

Meanwhile, of course, Proust was living his life, spending the summers
at Cabourg and thereby absorbing the background for what would become
book two, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, and also
beginning his acquaintance with Alfred Agostinelli,
a primary model for Albertine Simonet, the heroine and anti-heroine of
the novel, and especially of books five and six, The Prisoner and
The Fugitive. (I favor the more literal English titles of
the "Penguin Proust" over those of C.K. Scott Moncrieff and his later
editors, Messsrs Enright and Kilmartin. It remains to be seen what
Yale University Press will do with Mr. Carter's reworking of Scott
Moncrieff.)

It was the beginning of 1913 when Proust approached Bernard
Grasset through an intermediary, asking him "to publish, at my own
expense, ... a major work (let's call it a novel, for it is a sort of
novel) which I have finished" (italics added).
He still saw it as a work in two parts,
as he wrote a bit later: "There is a person who narrates and who says 'I';
there are a great many characters; they are 'prepared' in this first
volume, in such a way that in the second they will do exactly the
opposite of what one would have expected from the first." Grasset
accepted the offer, of course, and by May the proofs were ready for
the first volume, for which Proust had decided to call Du
côté de chez Swann. Playing on the two "ways" of
the narrator's youth, the concluding volume would "probably" be
Le côté de Guermantes, with an overall title of
À la recherche du temps perdu.

Swann's Way was published on November 22, 1913. By this time,
Proust saw (and warned Grasset) that the Search would be larger
than anticipated, with two more volumes to come: The Guermantes Way
and Finding Time Again. Soon after this joyous event, his beloved
Albertine/Agostinelli fled Proust's apartment, thus setting in train a
drama that Proust would inevitably include in his epic.

Meanwhile, he had more or less completed what he thought would be
the second volume, including the narrator's stay at "Balbec" and his
growing infatuation with "Albertine." That makes it seem that the story
was entirely ad hoc, with Proust writing his life into it as he went
along, but that's not entirely the case: as early as 1908, he had
projected a female character of whom he explained: "In the second part
of the novel the girl will be financially ruined and I will support her
without attempting to possess her because I am incapable of happiness."
It's almost as if he then sought out Agostinelli to play the part he'd
already sketched.

Before Proust finished those final two volumes, however, the Great War
began, and with it the total disruption of French society--and his
book. Bernard Grasset was called to military service, the printer's lead
was commandeered for a more bloody purpose, and Proust's epic was closed
down "for the duration," as we learned to in the first half of
the 20th century.

With manservants almost impossible to find, Proust brought Céleste
Albaret into his apartment to attend to him. He became so dependent upon
her that, unusual for him, he wrote her by name into the second book of
the Search. This part would become À l'ombre de jeunes
filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).

In 1916, Proust found a new publisher, Gaston Gallimard, whose firm
had earlier rejected Swann's Way, and in November of that year he
told Gallimard that he was ready to send him the manuscript of the second
book of what he now believed would be a four-part story: Swann's
Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes
Way, and Finding Time Again. (Apparently the third volume was
also sometimes called Sodom and Gomorrah.) William Carter
suggests that it may have been as early as November 1916 that Proust wrote
Fin at the bottom of the fourth book, and that he told Céleste
that he had completed his life's work: "Now I can die."

But the war itself was intruding onto his story, which more than doubled
in size from the roughly 500,000 words he'd written up to that time. Proust
at one point actually likened this experience to that of a military
commander: "A general is like a writer who sets out to write ... a certain
book, and then the book itself,
with the unexpected potentialities which it reveals here, the impassable
obtacles which it presents there, makes him deviate to an enormous degree
from his preconceived plan." The changes even affected the already-published
book: he decided to move Combray, where the narrator spends so much of his youth,
from its location near Chartres, south of Paris, to a more vulnerable spot
in the north, so the two "ways" of the narrator's boyhood can be obliterated
by war: "The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne ...
and the Germans have thrown other bridges across the river," as the former
Gilberte Swann explains in the final volume. "For a year and a half they
held one half of Combray and the French the other."

What with the war's disruptions, Proust's continual expansions, his
worsening health, and the inevitable battles with his publisher, no more
of the book would appear until 1919. It was in June of that year that
copies of the revised Swann's Way and -- at last! -- In the Shadow
of Young Girls in Flower were available for Proust to autograph and the
public to buy, along with an unrelated volume of his writings. The Search
was now essentially complete, as Proust explained to a critic: "the last
chapter of the last volume was written right after the first chapter of
the first volume. Everything in between was written afterward but long
ago. The war made it impossible to have proofs, now illness prevents me
from correcting them."

This was a bit disingenuous, overlooking the additions and alterations
he was making even as the books were being set in type. The
Guermantes Way was to be published in two parts, with the first volume
available in October 1920 and the second in May 1921, in an edition that
also contained an introduction to Sodom and Gomorrah. At this point,
Proust envisioned that his account of male and female homosexuality
would sprawl across multiple volumes, an idea that he would later jettison
in favor of retitling the later two -- the "Albertine cycle" -- as The
Prisoner and The Fugitive. "I have so many books to give you,"
Proust wrote his publisher about this time, "that if I die will not be
published (À la recherche du temps perdu has hardly begun."

So it seemed: the balance of Sodom and Gomorrah was released in
May 1922 as three distinct volumes, to meet Proust's objections to the
small type that had marred The Guermantes Way.

However, life has the final word in these matters, and Proust became
fatally ill while he was correcting the proofs of The Prisoner.
He died early in the morning of November 18, 1922, having worked with
Celéleste until 3:30 a.m., dictating revisions to the proofs
of The Prisoner. We cannot know what further changes he would
have made to that book, never mind the two that followed it. Their publication
at two-year intervals -- 1923, 1925, and 1927 -- was overseen by Jacques
Riviére, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française,
and Robert Proust, the author's physician-brother. The entire novel, and
especially the three books whose publication he did not live to approve,
were twice revised by French scholars, in the so-called "Pléiade
Editions" of 1954 and 1987-89.

The Penguin Proust

Sorry to say, the hardcover "Penguin Proust" is out of print, so
paperback or digital is the way to go. Click here for Amazon.com:

See individual listings for the UK links and for hardcover
editions. And beware of links on Amazon, which has conflated Penguin,
Enright, and public-domain editions and reviews beyond belief.

The Enright six-pack

Personally, I think the Penguin Proust is worth the extra cost, but
if you are a traditionalist or want to save money, you can get the
Enright - Kilmartin - Scott Moncrieff translation for about sixty bucks from
Amazon.com.
Click here to order.